Personal Knowledge Management

Personal knowledge management was the topic in this week’s Digital History lecture. We looked at leaning environments beyond the formal structure of lectures and note taking which dominate at secondary and third level education in Ireland. Harold Jarche calls this Formal Structured Learning, where the method in which people learn and work within this set out structure.

I can remember this formal learning structure from secondary schoo. A class that particularly stays in my memory was Irish. For the Leaving Cert  Irish exam  students must writre a short essay or aiste. Rather than letting us write out the essay ourselves, everyone in class was given the same essay to learn of by heart and regurgitate it come the Leaving Cert. I think this example epitomises a lot of the problems of the Leaving Cert. Considering that I and most people cannot speak Irish fluently after thriteen years of learning the language, this says a lot about the way Irish is taught.

           

Moving on from Irish, at Postgrad level in college, the learning emphasis is entirely different. Learning structured differently as formal lectures make up only a fraction of the time you have in a week. Learning is up to and directed by yourself. Jarche would call this Personal Directed Learning which forms part of his informal learning structure.

           

There is a wide range of resources to help people in knowledge retrieval process such as blogs news and commentary websites. People can use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter beyond just as a leisure activity and connect with online communities with a common area of interest with discussions or links to interesting. Jarche outlines how people can create a new level in the learning process of sharing knowledge through their own social networking or commenting on other people’s blog posts.

Reference links on JStor

Looking at my own Personal Knowledge Management(PKM) process, up to now I must admit I was certainly rather limited. Throughout my time as an undergrad, it involved using the UCC library catalogue and gathering

 relevant books to the topic. From there I would take notes as I read relevant chapters from those books. In terms of digital media I use the databases that are available on the UCC library website. An aspect ofthe JStor site which I had not noticed before was the reference links that

appear on the right had side of the article you are reading from the site. This is a very useful link that gives you the location of where your article has been referenced elsewhere in JStor and on Google Scholar.

I find digital media useful for getting access to interviews with people on topics of interest. Last year when doing my dissertation on the Workers’ Party I found an interview on Youtube with prominent member Séan Garland on a Dublin radio station and I a found video of a panel discussing the party’s newspaper the Irish People in the Irish Left Review website. Similarly RTÉ radio has a good archive of interviews with personalities even on shows that no longer broadcast. For a second year essay I did on the IRA split in 1969 I found a Tom McGurk interview with Ruairí Ó Bradaigh.

Since I started as Postgrad this year this class has informed me of the vast array of resources and tools on the internet which I was not even aware of before. Zotero is a tool I use much more to manage books and articles, rather than having to go through masses of notes taken in my copy. Blogs, a tool I didn’t even consider in my previous three years in college, are something I use much more now. As well as my own blog I can follow the blogs of commentators or historians relevant to the area of my research. I came across the blog of historian Tim Pat Coogan, who incidentally was not impressed by the RTÉ shortlist for Ireland’s Greatest and I also am following the Politico website. This website follows social and political issues and is linked to the work of journalist Vincent Browne. The website also has articles from an array of contributers and links to their blogs.

As well as blogs, I have started to use the CAIN web service. This is a brilliant website, which is an invaluable resource for anyone researching around the history of the Northern Ireland conflict. CAIN has a detailed chronology of events as well as links to digitised document from the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. The website also features many important articles and links to numerous other useful websites.

           
From a rather limited base at the start of this academic year I have tried to expand my PKM process as I learn more about the possibilities available in what Harold Jarche calls the 'informal learning' environment. This Digital History class has opened my eyes to the range of resources there is, beyond the traditional lecture and notes system.

Text Analysis Tools

We looked at text anlysis tools this week in class. I used Wordle and The Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPOR) to analyse some speeches and statements I have come across this year. Wordle is a tool which allows you to enter text into the website and it creates a word cloud which highlights the most commonly used words in the text. As the website says, they create 'beautiful word clouds' and do give you a great indication of the most commonly appearing words.

           

TAPOR is a text analysis tool set up by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the MacMaster University in Ontario. This website can analyse  the text of a HTML document from the internet or a TXT document saved on your computer. It lists unique words that appears in the document, the number of times they appear and you can see in what instances these words appeared.

When I started to use these tools I came across a problem in that most of the articles I hoped to use for text analysis came from the Irish Times Digital Archive, which displays articles in PDF format. As these articles are scanned it is impossible to copy and paste the text into the text analysis websites. After much frustration and failure, trying to use Evernote screen shots I eventually came across the image recognition site Online OCR. This website allows you to upload any scanned document whether it be a JPG image or a PDF scanned document and Online OCR will recognise any text on the documents enabling you to copy and paste it into TAPOR and Wordle.

I used these websites to analyse a minor dispute that arose between the Irish and British governments in early January 1978 over an interview Jack Lynch gave to RTÉ radio in which he stated his support for a power-sharing settlement in Northern Ireland and most controversially on a possible amnesty for Republican prisoners if a ceasefire were to be declared. Lynch issued a follow up statement days later after a barage of criticism from Unionist politicians and the Northern Ireland Secretary Roy Mason. The statement was published in the Irish Times  on January 10, 1978. Lynch angrily stated that at his previous meeting with Britsh Prime Minister James Callaghan  in September 1977 he had received a commitment from Callaghan of his determniation to reach a power-sharing settlement. I decided to compare the statement of Lynch in the Irish Times with the joint communiqué Callaghan and Lynch issued the previous September.

Below are the two Wordle word clouds.



Word Cloud for the joint communique of Jack Lynch and James Callaghan after their meeting, September 1977




Word Cloud for Jack Lynch's statement after comments on RTÉ radio, January 1978



Looking at this and the TAPOR results one can see  the words devolved and power-sharing feature prominently in Lynch’s speech. His attempt to play down the controversy over the Republican prisoner issue is seen is his mentioning of  the word amnesty only three times in the statement. It is also interesting to notice words that are not mentioned such as unity, a word Lynch used freely at the outbreak of the Troubles when passions were high and in opposition. It gives an indication of Lynch's tenative nature to calling for unity in his second term as Taoiseach, and his desire to avoid disrupingt the delicate situation in the North in the late 1970s.

In the earlier joint statement it isvisible Lynch had to yield considerably to Callaghan as the word power-sharing is not mentioned once! Words that reflect the pleasantries exchanged without any real progress dominated such as cooperation, community, talks and economic which  reflectied both government’s commitment to increased cross border economic cooperation. It is great that you can look beyond simple word counts in TAPOR, and look at the context in which they were used. In the case of the word cooperation I saw that in the joint speech this was used in terms of economic and security cooperation.

           

These text analysis tools are vital in examinig the content of political speeches and statements. They really reflect the  tensions and prominent issues which dominated in the example above. from what I have seen, Text Analysis tools can proove to be  invaluable in the analysis of political personalities and events.



Newspapers and Historical Reserach

Roberto Franzosi article examines issues related to using newspapers as research material. Some of the comments in the article related to the measurement error and coding schemes are a bit complex to get your head around but there are many great points regarding the way different newspapers report their news.

Franzosi notes how ‘some scholars see newspapers as integral parts of the ideological apparatus of capitalist society and agencies for reproduction of these societies’. ‘ According to this school of thought selection of news is not random - it reflects the intentions, will and interests of dominant economic groups. News coverage particularly misrepresents labor and class issues.’

With this point, the situation of William Martin Murphy during the 1913 Lockout springs to mind. Murphy was head of the Dublin United Tramway Company and also controlled the Irish Independant. James Larkin took the tram workers out on strike when Murphy wanted them to resign membership from the ITGWU. The strike of the tram workers began on August 26, 1913. The Evenning Herald was one of Murphy’s campaign papers and its attempt to support Murphy’s position is seen in the picture of the paper’s front page on the day the strike began. Despite the strike and its disruption the paper attempts to present a picture of minimal disturbance with the headline ‘HEIR EXAMPLE NOT FOLLOWED BY THE VAST BODY OF MEN’ and a photograph of a tram pronouncing ‘TRAMS WORKING AS USUAL’. Throw in a headline with allegations financial irregularities around Larkin’s wages and you have a good example of a newspaper trying to uphold what Franzosi calls the ‘interests of the dominant economic groups.’

    

The article makes an interesting point about bias in newspapers. When I look for bias in a report I may expect to find inaccurate statements but Franzosi refers to bias being detectable in a more subtle fashion. ‘Bias is likely to be silence or emphasise rather than false information...Language is a tool of media manipulation.’

The article is concluded by analysing the validity of newspaper data and newspaper data’s reliability. He says newspapers are reliable, because 'most conflict studies go through painstaking efforts to ensure that whatever is reported by newspapers is recorded without error.' On the other hand Frannzosi concludes data is often not valid, for the reason that ‘the higher the intensity of an event, the higher the probability of it being reported. Thus validity can be achieved simply by raising the threshold of events. However, this implies the loss of generality and of number of cases.’

This is something I noticed myself in looking through the papers in researching my thesis topic related to Northern Ireland between 1977 and 1979. By the late 1970s violence was an entrenched feature of northern society and this is reflected in the reporting of killings in the papers. I noticed how the deaths of a single civilian, solider, RUC officer or even lone bombing incident are mentioned in short articles in the papers. However, with an event such as the murder of Lord Louis Mountbatten the coverage surrounding the event was one of manifest outrage and it was the leading story in its aftermath. Obviously Mountbatten was a public figure but it is an example that serves to illustrate how newspapers can increase the validity of an incident.

Overall Franzosi article had a number of very interesting insights into issues of using newspapers as sources and had many points I will consider in my own research in the future.    

Airbrushed for Change

This week we were editing the images we took of historical sites around Cork. Image editing is a fantastic resource which enables peole to make radical changes to their original pictures. David Cameron learned this to his cost in the recent British General Election suffering ridicule from the media and Labour during campaigning for his clearly airbrushed image on Conservative party posters. A spin was subsequently put on the Conservative slogan 'Year For Change'  as an internet campaign called 'Airbrushed for Change' was launched on mydavidcameron.net.

I used Picnik to edit my photos. This was really easy to use and didn't require any download. You just uploaded your photo onto the site and edit as you wish. I made some changes to a photograph I took of Charles Fort in Kinsale. On the day the photo was taken the sun was really glaring and at a low angle which made taking good pictures very difficult. I made some changes to the picture below by cropping out the sun on top of the picture and editing the temperature and saturation to get rid of some of the glare from the sun.

The results are really great. Companys now promoting Ireand as a tourist destination use image editing in brochures to lighten up our usual dull weather.Thanks to Picnic and other image editing tools we never again have to see pictures of dull, rainy landscapes or politicians with a single imperfection on their faces.